My thesis attempts to address several of the major issues surrounding Ezra Pound's 1919 poem "Homage to Sextus Propertius," a notoriously unfaithful translation or adaptation of selected lyrics written by the eponymous Latin poet. I begin by situating "Homage" and its publication within the context of Pound's life and milieu, focusing especially on the early discourse about how the poem fits into the Pound corpus. From here I turn to the question of what function translation--broadly defined--serves in the poem, as a bridge between literary periods and a mode of both criticism and original expression. Ultimately, I offer a reading of the poem that historicizes it as a product, in key ways, of the wartime environment in which it was written, and try to evaluate it as a major turning point in Pound's career.